1. Introduction
Allow me to elaborate on a topic that doesn't get discussed nearly as much as it should. That is, the statutory-rape laws and sex laws in general for Americans vacationing or living outside the United States.
In the good old days, whenever an American traveled to a foreign country either to vacation or to live, the statutory age of consent in that nation was what they had to observe. However, in the 1990s, along came former Congressman Joseph Patrick Kennedy II (“former Congressman Joe Kennedy”) with his bright idea to export the statutory-age-of-consent laws from our nation to all over the world for any American citizen vacationing or living abroad.
Eventually, former Congressman Joe Kennedy got this bill signed into law on a Federal level. I believe that it was President George W. Bush who signed it into law in the form of the PROTECT Act of 2003. Correct me if I'm wrong. The law sets the international statutory age of consent at 18 years old for Americans vacationing or living abroad.
Nevertheless, I have found information on the Internet that claims that the international statutory age of consent is 16 years old for Americans vacationing or living abroad in instances of consensual sexual relations, whereas it is 18 years old for commercial sexual relations. However, don't hold me to it. These Federal sex laws are vaguer than our elected officials care to realize. Then again, they probably want them to be that way, because ignorance is no defense for a crime.
In an interview with the media before the bill was ratified, former Congressman Joe Kennedy gave a chastising speech about how wrong he felt it was for adult Americans to go traveling to foreign countries with low statutory ages of consent to have sex with teenagers who would otherwise be jailbait in our nation, as a way of circumventing the American statutory-rape laws.
Nevertheless, after former Congressman Joe Kennedy's brother, the late Michael Lemoyne Kennedy, was accused of having an illicit affair with a 14-year-old babysitter, former Congressman Joe Kennedy was all ready to move mountains to keep his brother from ever seeing the inside of a state correctional facility. What a hypocrite he turned out to be.
Then again, former Congressman Joe Kennedy is not the first and only politician in our nation ever to live by double standards when it comes to sex laws involving teenage minors. We only have to look at what a sick, hypocritical joke former Congressman Mark Foley turned out to be in his puritanical mission to criminalize sexual intercourse between adults and teenage minors.
Self-righteous people are the most deplorable individuals ever to enter politics, and they can be found on both sides of the political aisle. Former Congressman Joe Kennedy fits that same mold accurately. He's in love with himself insofar as he has the moral compass of a cat in heat, while he passes judgment on people he doesn't even know. Even his own family members have said so about him.
Herein I'm going to describe whether an American who is either vacationing or living abroad can get out of a Federal statutory-rape indictment by renouncing his or her United States citizenship and never returning to the United States if that minor was above the statutory age of consent in the nation where the consensual relations occurred. That is, if that individual wants to risk a fate of statelessness.
If you're in a situation of that nature and you're reading my article, don't give up your U.S. citizenship for a future of statelessness just yet. It may not be as wise of a thing to do as you think.
2. Statelessness - An Undesirable Option In Any Event
All right. So, you and a group of friends decide to go vacationing in Brazil. That nation has beautiful beaches, and, moreover, it has beautiful women. In fact, it has some of the most beautiful women in the world, and you're single and without a girlfriend. Therefore, it seems like a good idea at the time.
You get down there, and you and your friends discover that there is a strong party vibe throughout Rio de Janeiro. You and your friends want to get in on the action.
You and your friends decide to go to one of the local nightclubs to dance and have some fun. You know that the place is going to be flooding with really attractive women. It has a reputation of being a hotspot for getting in on all the action.
You meet someone who is like a dream girl to you. She tells you that she's 19 years old. You trust her that she's being truthful about her age and that she is not a minor. What can you do? Card her? You're not from Brazil, so you're not going to know what a Brazilian driver's license is supposed to look like; and you won't be able to tell a fake one from a real one.
You could choose to date only women over 30 years of age there in Brazil to avoid an underage girl lying to you about being older, but you know that women that age there are either going to be already married or involved in a serious relationship; and they're probably not going to give you the time of day because of it.
You talk with this young lady for a while, and you both really hit it off. She agrees to go back to your hotel room with you. Later that night you both make love. It's an experience that you'll never forget.
Now, I never recommend that anyone has sex with someone they have just met. However, in our hook-up culture, there are bound to be situations in which two people become intimate after knowing each other for less than a day. It's inevitable, especially in an exciting place like Brazil.
The next morning you feel like a million dollars. The sex was like a non-stop dopamine hit for you, and your only regret is that you have to get up, get showered, and get dressed to meet up with your friends inasmuch as one of them wanted to go sightseeing and you agreed to go along with him.
Then comes the bombshell. The young girl admits to you that she is younger than she initially represented herself to be. She tells you that she will be 15 years old next month. You then realize that you have just engaged in sexual intercourse with a minor barely in her teenage years, and this could mean serious legal consequences for you.
You also want to spend time with this girl again, because you have to admit that an opportunity like this doesn't come along for you that often. You weren't a nerd in high school, but you weren't one of the popular kids either who had all the girls flocking at him.
Nevertheless, you realize that you have to break things off with this girl quickly now that you know that you'd only be risking further problems if you didn't do so. The girl is crying and apologizing to you about lying about her age, but it's not going to do you any good if the wrong people find out about your liaison with her.
Then you get to thinking. The statutory age of consent in Brazil is only 14 years old. Therefore, you're not going to be getting a knock on the door to your hotel room from the local authorities. However, when you reenter the United States, you could still be arrested for violating the Federal extraterritorial sex laws inasmuch as this girl is a minor.
You're not going to pick the telephone up and notify the U.S. Embassy that you had sex with a 14-year-old girl, and your friends are not going to turn you in either. Therefore, you develop a false sense of security that what happens in Brazil stays in Brazil.
There's only one problem. If the girl tells her parents, they might pick up the telephone receiver and phone the U.S. Embassy to report you for having sexual intercourse with their underage daughter.
You beg the young girl not to tell anyone about what happened between you and her the night before, but you have no guarantee that she's going to keep it all under wraps. She's upset. She's crying. Teenage girls are capable of doing anything when they're that way.
After you meet up with your friends to go sightseeing, you tell them what happened inasmuch as they are curious to know if you had sex with that girl who left the nightclub with you last night. You tell them that you did, but you also tell them not to tell anyone about it; and you explain to them that it turned out that she was only 14 years old. They're all shocked, but they know that it wasn't your fault inasmuch as the girl lied to you about her age.
Your friends promise you that they'll keep everything you told them a secret. It seems as though everything is going to be okay afterwards. After all, Brazil is one of the most tolerant nations to age-gap relationships between teenage minors and adults. However, you must remember that you're an outsider in a foreign land, and the locals there might not be as accepting of your indiscretions with a mature-looking underage girl as they would be with one of their own fellow Brazilians.
The day arrives that you and your friends are going to be flying back to the United States. You and your friends arrive to the airport. However, you notice that your airline ticket is missing from the pocket of your vest. What could be more aggravating than accidentally leaving your airline ticket behind in your hotel room?
You hope that one of the hotel cleaning people doesn't take the airline ticket for themselves. Then again, they probably don't have the necessary paperwork to enter the United States, so they'll probably turn the airline ticket into the front desk for you to claim it. You know that you're going to miss your flight, and it's going to be a big hassle afterwards; but you have to go back to the hotel in hopes that somebody will give that airline ticket back to you.
It turns out that the hotel employees are very honest, and one of the clerks behind the front desk hand you the lost airline ticket and he even offers to handle the rescheduling of your flight back to the United States. He's even nice enough to allow you to stay in a hotel room for free the next couple of days until you can get on your next flight to the United States.
Wow! You don't get that kind of red-carpet treatment in the United States when situations like that creep up on you.
You're sitting in your free hotel room, and your cell phone rings eventually. You recognize the telephone number on the caller identification as belonging to one of your friends who recently flew back to the United States on the flight on which you were originally supposed to be.
After you speak with your friend on your cell phone for the first few minutes, you realize that you missing your flight to the United States was a blessing in disguise. Your friend, who happens to look like you, informs you that a Federal officer dashed at him in the U.S. airport, thinking that he was you and threw him to the ground inasmuch as he had a warrant for your arrest on Federal sex charges.
You cannot figure out how the U.S. Federal authorities found out that you had sex with a 14-year-old girl in Brazil, but now they know. So, what are you going to do? The minute you step off an airplane in an American airport, you're going to be arrested. Therefore, you decide to cancel your flight.
You feel as though your heart is going to drop out of you. You're now a wanted criminal fugitive in the United States. You call your parents, and they're naturally upset about it. You know that your money is eventually going to run out, but anything can be better than prison. Well, almost anything, that is.
Fortunately, one of your friends has relatives in Brazil that can help you get a job and get established in your new residence. However, the American authorities are not finished with you yet. They wish to make an example out of you. They're considering extraditing you from Brazil back to the United States and slapping you with any additional criminal charges they can do so because of your refusal to turn yourself into them.
You heard that Brazilian lawmakers have gotten tough with American sex tourists, but you're not a sex tourist. You merely had sex with a 14-year-old girl who fooled you into believing that she was 19 years old. It doesn't matter. The American authorities are out to get you, and they won't stop at it until they have you in handcuffs in an airplane bound for the United States.
The Brazilian authorities have been cracking down on sex tourism involving minors for some time now. Below is a video about it.
A Public Service Announcement In Brazil About Sex Tourism Aired During The Football World Cup Over A Decade Ago
Brazil even received a visit from Queen Silvia of Sweden about the concern over sex tourism in Brazil not too long ago. Your optics simply don't look good, even though deep down in your heart you know that you're not a sexual predator of any kind.
You could turn yourself into the American authorities. However, do you really want to go down that road? You're probably not going to get a fair trial in the United States. You only have to watch Norman Michael Achin's video below to know what that scene is all about.
Norman Michael Achin Exposes The Vicious Attitudes Within The American Criminal Justice System Regarding Sex Laws Pertaining To Minors
Aside from going to prison for decades, you could also be facing a lifetime of sex-offender registration once you get arrested in the United States for what you did in Brazil. Below is a video of a gentleman on YouTube who goes by the user name of Official Accountability. Even though he has gotten his name removed from the sex-offender registry in Texas where he lives, he still encounters difficulties in his overseas travel because of having been on it.
YouTuber Official Accountability Describes His Difficulties With Overseas Travel In Spite Of His Removal From Sex-Offender Registry
You don't want to know what it's like to be a registered sex offender. Therefore, you know you're not going back to the United States, at least not voluntarily.
Then something dawns on you, and you consider doing the unthinkable. That is, you decide to phone an attorney to inquire about renouncing your U.S. citizenship. However, you have to keep in mind that you don't have citizenship with any other nation. Therefore, you're going to become stateless if you do so, and the attorney who speaks with you stresses that same concern to you.
It appears to be the path of least resistance. You do feel uncomfortable about walking into the U.S. consulate to finalize your renunciation process, because you're not sure what jurisdiction you will be in once you set foot in that same facility; and you don't want to be arrested and hauled back to the United States.
Let's pretend that you're still in the Brazilian jurisdiction when you go into the U.S. consulate there in Rio de Janeiro. I know that the U.S. consulates in Germany are still within the German jurisdiction rather than that of the United States, because a Steven Robert Whitsett once mentioned it in one of his videos on YouTube. Therefore, an American criminal fugitive cannot be subject to arrest in those facilities in Germany.
I'm not sure how this all plays out in Brazil, but we'll make-believe that you can walk into a U.S. consulate there and not worry about U.S. Federal authorities arresting you for the purpose of this story. If you know what the exact law is for that, let me know down in the comments section.
You get lucky enough to schedule an appointment to meet with a group of consulate officials at the U.S. consulate in Rio de Janeiro, even though it usually takes weeks, even months, before most people can get an appointment with them. You think your life is going to be so much easier than it is now after you renounce your U.S. citizenship. However, because you will be stateless in that event, your complications are only beginning to go from bad to worse.
Below are two videos of Andrew Henderson describing the horrors of becoming stateless. You may not be spending decades behind bars sharing a prison cell with Bubba back in the so-called land of milk and honey, but your life is going to be no walk in the park either once you renounce your U.S. citizenship and become stateless.
Andrew Henderson Explains The Ramifications Of An American Becoming Stateless On Their Own Volition
Did Roman Polanski get extradited back to the United States after he fled to France in 1978 to escape the punitive consequences of a statutory-rape conviction? No, he didn't. However, he didn't go down the road of becoming stateless. He merely took advantage of loopholes in the laws so that he could prevent the U.S. authorities from extraditing him back to the United States to face imprisonment.
You, on the other hand, will become a citizen of no nation at all once you renounce your U.S. citizenship. Could you apply for Brazilian citizenship? You could try it, but you probably won't get it. Let's remember that you're a criminal fugitive from the United States, and the Brazilian immigration officials aren't going to cut you any breaks. Moreover, obtaining citizenship in another country could take years, and you don't have that much time to address your situation.
You do the dirty deed, and you renounce your U.S. citizenship. Now you are stateless. Could the U.S. authorities still extradite you at this point? I know of no law that would prevent them from doing so. Then again, they probably won't do so at this point inasmuch as it would be too much trouble for them.
I mean, if the U.S. authorities could successfully extradite you back to the United States, they know that they'd eventually have to deport you out of the country once you have served your prison sentence. However, where would they deport you to? You're stateless, and probably no country would accept you.
So, what would the U.S. authorities do in that event? Give you a parachute, fly you up in a helicopter, and dump you in the Sahara Desert? It would be too much bother for them to do so. By now, they've probably given up any intentions of forcing you to return to the United States.
So, now you think you're scot-free, and nobody will ever bother you again. Then you find out that the Brazilian authorities are trying to deport you from Brazil, because you have no legal paperwork to stay there. Your efforts to secure such paperwork have been futile, because they know why you're stateless and they don't want you staying in their nation.
The United Nations is currently on a mission to protect the rights of stateless people, but you know such efforts usually take time before anything becomes of them. You're not going to be spending every night for decades being raped in an American prison, but your life isn't going to be a bed of roses either.
You could also have one additional significant problem. You may not still be a spring chicken in your early twenties but rather a mature man in his fifties or sixties who merely had wanted to feel like a kid again. When people see your gray hair, they're simply not going to feel sorry for you being in your predicament.
Middle-aged men are always going to be held to a higher standard than 20-something-year-old men in these types of situations. It doesn't matter if you travel to a nation whose society has no problem with age-gap relationships between middle-aged men and teenage girls. In any event, you shouldn't judge such a man, because he could be having a midlife crisis for all we know.
There are probably many people out there who have gone through this same ordeal because they have an inadvertent confrontation with the American extraterritorial sex laws. I could advise each and every American to be careful about whom they get involved with when they're overseas, but usually doing so is an afterthought for most Americans who travel abroad.
The American public has not been thoroughly educated on how the Federal sex laws work when traveling abroad. They don't even know that they're breaking them overseas until after a Federal officer is putting handcuffs on them.
My proposed solution to the problem is for each and every American to write to their elected officials on Capitol Hill to seek to change these laws so that they are not so dangerously broad. Other societies are much more permissive about their teenage minors having sexual relationships with adults than the United States is, so Americans vacationing or living overseas are bound to run into situations in which they become intimately involved with someone they don't even know is a minor.
Even though President Bush had well-meaning intentions when he signed the PROTECT Act of 2003 into law, he overlooked the fact that this same law was going to produce an array of needless problems for Americans vacationing and living abroad. President Bush apparently did not research the implications of this law thoroughly before he ratified it.
If a 77-year-old man travels to Bangkok, Thailand to pay to rape a 5-year-old girl in a brothel, I'm all in favor of prosecuting him to the fullest extent of the law. Such a man is evil and deserves to experience the full wrath of the law. However, if a 21-year-old man is partying in Paris, France, and he mistakes a 15-year-old girl for a 19-year-old woman before having sex with her, he shouldn't have to face criminal charges in the United States for it, especially because 15 years old is the statutory age of consent in France.
3. Final Thoughts
It infuriates me that our elected officials here in the United States will go above and beyond to segregate adult men from teenage girls in a sexual manner if those same adult men are Americans vacationing or living in other parts of the world, whereas there is not even one state jurisdiction in our nation that executes inmates for committing prison rape. It's as though our lawmakers get to cherry-pick what they want to constitute rape or not.
The six conservative Republican Supreme Court justices would ensure that the ruling of Coker vs. Georgia got overturned in a heartbeat if such a ruling were ever challenged. That ruling never made sense from its conception in the Supreme Court of the United States ("SCOTUS") nearly five decades ago. We all live in a much different world than Americans lived in back in 1977.
Even if a 15-year-old girl in some nation like Hungary meets a 20-year-old American, falls in love with him, and then becomes intimate with him, the U.S. authorities will treat this man as though he committed the rape of the century despite that his sexual relationship with the girl was completely consensual and legal there in Hungary. Our tax dollars are being wasted on these witch hunts every year.
There is a world of a difference between an adult sexually exploiting a defenseless, little child and a teenager having a cross-generational relationship with an adult, who may not even be that much older than her. If these idiots in our legislative branch and executive branch of our government can't even get these sex laws right, we need to vote them all out of office. They're there to serve us rather than the other way around.
This article is copyright-protected.